this is not to say that our inner life has some kind of a second grade um existence conventional reality is not 00:25:14 second level reality um because as the guardian and chandra kirti also emphasized we must remember that conventional reality dependent 00:25:26 origination is exactly the same as emptiness which is ultimate reality the only kind of reality anything that we ever encounter is going to have is conventional reality so when i'm talking 00:25:38 here about cognitive illusion i'm not arguing that the existence of our interstates um is illusory i'm arguing that the illusion is that we have immediate access to them as they are and 00:25:51 that their mode of existence um is um intrinsic existence so this allows us to understand the majority analysis of the most fundamental cognitive illusion 00:26:04 of all the illusion of the immediacy of our knowledge of our own minds and the givenness of our own interstates and processes our direct knowledge of them as the kinds of things they are independent of 00:26:18 any concepts that's the illusion that wittgenstein quine and sellers each in there worked so hard in the 20th century to diagnose and to cure but we can put this just as easily and maybe more 00:26:31 easily in the terms of second century indian madhyamaka the fundamental cognitive illusion is to take our mental states to exist intrinsically rather than conventionally and to take our knowledge of them to be 00:26:45 immediate independent of conventions this illusion is pervasive it is instinctive and it is profoundly self-alienating because it obscures the deeply conventional character of our own 00:26:57 existence and of our self-knowledge and this illusion is what according to buddhist philosophers lies at the root of our grasping of our attraction and diversion and hence at the root of the 00:27:09 pervasive suffering of existence

the reason is that a perception 00:10:38 is kind of perceptual in structure and the buddhist world encodes this by arguing that the internal um sense the the manus venana is a sense faculty just like external faculties 00:10:52 and so just as our external faculties present us with a world that just seems to us even though we know it's not to be just as it is that we see it just as it is 00:11:03 it's tempting to think that we've got this apparent object distinct from our sensory apprehension of it but is but an object that's presented by a completely veritable process 00:11:15 because as i say perception just feels like it presents the world to us as it is i look at a red apple and i think damn i know exactly what that apple smells like looks like tastes like and 00:11:27 feels like forgetting that all i have is the apple as it's mediated by the peculiar perceptual system that i have and by all of the conceptual resources through which i filtered my perception 00:11:41 so in the same way a perception or introspective awareness just feels like it presents our own cognitive affective and perceptual states to us just as they are 00:11:53 independent of that appreceptive system and those conceptual categories so just as external perception gives us the illusion that we're just detectors of the world as it is inner perception can give us the illusion that we are just 00:12:06 detectors of our inner um our inner world just as it is so even when we remind ourselves as i'm reminding you right now of this 00:12:18 extremely complex mediation of our perceptual encounter with external objects we find ourselves in constantly experiencing our own experience as though 00:12:31 we've got the world just as it is and then we sometimes say okay maybe we're not getting the world just as it is but at least i'm getting my sensory experiences just as they are the apple might not be red but the redness i 00:12:42 experience is exactly the redness that i think i experience the sweetness that i introspect must be the sweetness just as it is and so forth so even if we give up for a moment and it's hard to give it up 00:12:54 for more than that the notion of immediacy with regard to external perception we often retreat to thinking that that's mediated but my awareness of my own inner episodes is the immediate 00:13:06 awareness that mediates my knowledge of the external world and i think that in the sense of that perception that sense of immediacy is even greater it's really hard for us to be convinced that our inner experience 00:13:20 could possibly be deceptive we seem to think that if i think that i believe something i must believe it if i think that i'm feeling something i must be feeling it and that feeling and that believing grab my inner 00:13:33 reality just as it is and so part of the problem that arises is that the mediation of our introspective awareness by our introspective faculty becomes 00:13:46 cognitively invisible to us just as what i'm seeing the world my visual faculty is invisible and it just delivers a visible world to me and i have to really think to to understand 00:13:58 what my own visual faculty visual organ and visual consciousness are contributing i think i experience my introspective faculty as just giving me inner objects and i have to think and remind myself 00:14:11 that actually my inner sense faculty is also a fallible instrument and that i may be misusing that instrument or that instrument might be intrinsically deceptive and that's a hard thing to get one's mind around 00:14:25 as a consequence we've become seduced by this idea that even if our knowledge of some things is mediated that mediation can't go all the way down we get seduced by the idea that there's got to be a 00:14:38 basic foundational level of experience to which we can have some kind of immediate access and to which when we know it we know it absolutely veritically in the theory of knowledge that leads us to foundationalism in the 00:14:51 philosophy of mind it leads us to sense datum theory um and i find that in a lot of buddhist situations a lot of buddhist practitioners take it to be this idea of an infallibility of an immediate kind of 00:15:03 experience if i'm sitting on the cushion just right so with all of that in play um i want to move to exercising that myth of the given that i've been characterizing 00:15:16 and to show that buddhist philosophy offers us powerful ways of doing that and i'm going to begin by talking about first person knowledge through the lens of the madhyamaka tradition

16:15 - Adam Smith - The Wealth of Nations

another aspect to cognitive illusion here is the illusion um that our sense perception is something that 00:22:02 is transparent and simply delivering us a world as a telescope does and not as a cognitive not as a kaleidoscope does as a consequence then the sense that we 00:22:15 know our own cognitive states directly and accurately through inner sense as well of outer sense has got to be a cognitive illusion as well are of the the sortals or the concepts that we use 00:22:28 in order to introspect are just as opaque to us as our senses are and give us just as a non-transparent access to our inner world as our senses give to the outer 00:22:42 world

the illusion that pervades our sense perception is that what we experience is something external to us that somehow 00:20:10 we've got a world that exists as it is independent of us and that we simply happen to be perfect world detectors and we wander through it detecting things just as they are

our mind functions as dharma yearly 00:19:43 emphasized as an instrument through which we have access to the world

so first i'm going to really focus on that allure of immediacy and then move into this kind of arc from yamaka through yogachara and into zen and my aim is going to be 00:09:49 um to show you that i think the buddhist tradition gets the all of these issues roughly right that is i'm not simply going to be characterizing what buddhists say about this i'm actually defending it and i think that we can 00:10:02 therefore learn a great deal about subjectivity through very careful attention to the multiple ways in which buddhist philosophers have considered this issue so i'm going to try to be shedding light 00:10:13 on contemporary debates as well by attention to buddhist resources

when we attribute sensory experiences to 00:06:39 ourselves for instance like the experience of red or the experience of seeing blue the model is external properties and we think of there as being inner properties just like those external properties that somehow we are 00:06:52 um we are seeing immediately

another way to put this and we're going to go there in a moment um is that we could say that we're tempted just overwhelmingly 00:05:09 tempted to believe that to believe that when we have perceptual experience including introspective experience of our own minds we think that we know that content immediately the idea that to be in a 00:05:22 cognitive state is to know that state and the idea that our inner states present themselves to introspection even trained introspection just as they are

buddhism is first and foremost a solution to a problem the problem is the 00:02:47 ubiquity of suffering in samsara and buddhism is all about trying to solve that problem and famously there's a diagnosis of that problem where the immediate conditions 00:02:59 of suffering are attraction and aversion but where the root cause the thing that gives rise to that attraction and aversion to those pathologies is a profound confusion about the nature of reality and it's that confusion that 00:03:13 leads us to the attraction and aversion that takes us into samsara and since it's an illusion we should pay attention to the classical indian understanding of what illusion is and 00:03:25 that is something that appears in one way but exists in another that is an illusion isn't something that's completely non-existent it's something his mode of existence and his mode of appearance are discordant from one 00:03:37 another and we're going to be focusing on that a great deal in this talk but the idea is that because this primal confusion this illusion lies at the root of suffering the only way to end the 00:03:50 problem of suffering is to extinguish the illusion and what i want to talk about today is how that illusion manifests in the case of our own minds and what i'm going to argue is is this 00:04:03 that that confusion manifests as a conviction that we have an immediate knowledge of our own minds that we can be indubitably aware of the contents of our own minds and the second aspect of that delusion equally pernicious is that 00:04:16 it involves the sub the superimposition of a subject object duality on experience that is uh primordially non-dual um so that primal confusion can be 00:04:28 thought of this way um it's taking that which is impermanent to be permanent that which is a source of suffering to be a source of happiness that which is only conventionally real to be ultimately real that which is 00:04:42 interdependent to be independent and the important point for our purposes is that the thesis that our own experience is permeated with illusion applies to our experience of our own minds as well 00:04:55 that's what i want to emphasize here

cognitive illusion and immediate experience perspectives 00:01:44 from buddhist philosophy

for example i'm talking so my primary mind now is going 01:14:37 to be an auditory mind okay and then there's going to be a whole constellation of next secondary ones which are basically positive and negative or harmful uh positive non-harmful and harmful uh 01:14:51 qualities or attributes or emotions or thoughts or attitudes and then the next moment i'm looking at my screen so i have a visual mind and the constellation will change you know some of those 01:15:04 positive and negative qualities like i'm feeling a little sleepy or i'm very alert or i'm feeling jealous or i'm feeling very happy and connected you know with this 01:15:16 conversation those would be part of the secondary minds and then you know you have this infinite continuum everyone every living being every as you rightfully said sentient beings a living 01:15:26 being with a mind carlo um has um its own mental continuum um so it involves it's a big picture of mind it involves you know our 01:15:40 our thinking it involves our intellect it involves our heart feelings emotions uh and it involves those deeper levels in that sixth primary mind mental consciousness such as intuition and 01:15:53 deeper minds